Subtlety
This is a guest post by John Young, that complements the previous post, Moondoggle.
Why this extraordinary bias against what already exists, in favor of stuff that is in many cases not even on the drawing boards? I offer an explanation. Most of these scientists work for an organization which I will call Big Science Business Government. SGB. All one thing, not three separate groups, and least of all three competing groups. All of these people, whether corporate executives or Physics professors or Washington bureaucrats, want to see SGB, or SBG, get even bigger and stronger. This is why they don't like forms of energy that lend themselves to individual, or small-scale, or community action. —From John Holt's letter to Nelson (Bud) Talbott, 8/3/1975 in A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt
Unschoolers tend to believe that the most important issues of our lives deserve our personal attention, and that our personal attention, in turn, is naturally drawn to what is important—if it’s not schooled out of us. John Holt had precious little tolerance for easy answers—for curricula which would automatically make us healthy, wealthy, and wise; for experts who grew frustrated when asked for examples; and for Big Science Business Government who wrested from people their ability to educate, feed, or physic themselves. For as wise as his first book has proven to be about the failures of schooling, Holt wrote of it: “This book is the rough and partial record of a search for answers to these questions.” Wisdom born of humility—made of journals and memos—that could never have been born any other way.
Subtlety is required when approaching the goods and services of Big Science Business Government (SBG). What SBGs design, market, and sell surely range in worth from very good to very bad, and Holt is frankly contending that the majority of what they produce tends toward the bad side, or else could have been better produced at or near home. For certain complicated and arguably beneficial items which no cottage industry can produce, more subtlety is required in our approach. In general, a measure of distrust is a good thing as we evaluate what these SBGs produce, since even everyday solutions which have served us for thousands of years are ditched in a rush toward new science and new sales.
I wish to discuss a recent example of where accepted science and SBG have evidently been wrong and then relay this to an even weedier topic. I imagine that this will ring true to many unschoolers since we reject the common credo that learning needs to be structured, categorized, and graded. This recent example of bad science, I contend, is that of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), which are especially pertinent here, since these are commonly touted in schools. If school-science calls a bad thing good (that is, changing the millennia-old DNA of a crop to withstand heavier doses of petrochemical pesticides because pesticides reduce human labor), then how might we approach other very charged topics?
In a brilliant book entitled Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver makes the claim that GMOs are exacerbating world hunger and that the solution to which is local, non-GMO horticulture. She chronicles her family’s year of consuming only locally produced food—its challenges, its humor, its beauty—in an unforgettable way, and analogizes this experience to a worldwide sustainability strategy. As with de-schooling authors, in reading Kingsolver’s work, we see the veracity of her experience and her claims—and more than see it, we feel it.
In response to a New Yorker article claiming that GMOs are the world’s salvation, Kingsolver writes:
The big guys have so completely taken over the rules of the game, it’s hard to see how food systems really work, but this criticism hits the nail right on the point end: It’s perfectly backward. One of industrial agriculture’s latest feed-the-hungry schemes offers a good example of why that is so. Exhibit A: “golden rice.” . . . The developers of this biotechnology say they will donate the seeds—with some strings attached—to Third World farmers . . . but most of the world’s malnourished children live in countries that already produce surplus food. We have no reason to believe they would have better access to this special new grain. Golden rice is one more attempt at a monoculture solution to nutritional problems that have been caused by monocultures and disappearing diversity.
I cannot encapsulate her entire wisdom in a paragraph, but any open-minded scientist owes it to his or her research and subjects to entertain this and similar arguments.
That is, however, not an acceptable hypothesis in the science that is taught in school, by and large. Not acceptable, because it is often flatly dismissed. Here, for example, is how National Public Radio entitled an article: “Americans don't trust Scientists’ take on food issues,” which implies that all scientists concur. The author writes: “For instance, 39 percent of the survey participants believe that genetically modified foods are worse for your health than non-GM food. However, there's essentially no scientific evidence to support that belief — a conclusion confirmed most recently by a National Academy of Sciences report.”
Of course, there is evidence to support the belief! GMOs used in industrial farming almost exclusively promote monoculture; one only needs to look down from an airplane to spot artificial squares of the same crop. The classic example of the danger of monoculture is the potato crop failure in Ireland in the 19th century. Humans themselves have converted the biosphere into an increasing monoculture to the detriment not only to manifold other species but to themselves. Even with this writing on the wall, NPR can’t see the harm in making such statements.
Furthermore, for many of those who prioritize planet and soil health, biodiversity, and global hunger reduction, this lumping of all “scientists” together is a slap in the face, the more painful for its cocksureness. It may be that most highly paid genetic bioengineers concur, but hardly those who understand the greater issue, of which anyone who views this open-mindedly may classify as a “scientist.” According to the National Academy of Sciences, however, this is the thesis that should be taught in schools.
The Alliance for Science, associated with Cornell University, wrote an article entitled, “Study suggests science education improves attitudes about GMO food.” It makes a to-do about how “value-free” knowledge “leads to more positive attitudes toward GM foods.” Again, what kind of fallacies are being packaged, shipped, and forced into curricula (and foisted upon students)? How “value-free” can this curriculum be? Apparently, the more “education” that a student has with this particular course, the less informed he or she will be. (Many unschoolers might respond here: “Wouldn’t be the first time!”)
On the other hand, there is a distinctly richer flavor to unschooling, which Ben Hewitt discusses in a seminal essay on the topic in Outside magazine, later a book, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World. He describes the bucolic setting in which his children live, making a point to add a photograph of them drying by hand the chokecherries they had foraged. He writes:
Organic vegetable grower Eliot Coleman told me once, "It's important for democracy to have a certain percentage of people feeding themselves so they can tell government to go f**k off. So grow something. I'm tempted to say ‘grow anything’ but frankly, there's already enough zucchini in the world. So, anything but zucchini. OK?”
The book The Teacher was the Sea centers around how students were able to shape their own classes and instruction, much of which directly pertained to food production. An easy corollary to make is “The Teacher was the Foraging of Chokecherries,” and the message is clear: When people (the young especially) are able to engage their curiosity with their natural world in a way that delivers a challenge and reward, they are able to learn from it in a way that no set curriculum could ever deliver.
Unschooling and open-pollinated, small-scale, mostly or entirely organic agriculture tend to go hand-in-hand. It is anathema to foist off our food production onto a mere six companies that pollute our waters so much that manatees are starving in Florida. John Holt said that growing one’s own food was a revolutionary act and that carrying a sign in a picket line is not enough, really, to get anything meaningful done.
In the discussion of SBG, the topic of vaccines—namely, the COVID vaccines—is simply unavoidable. It is one of the most publicly contentious areas of science and medicine today. Before getting more specific, I want to state that it is not my place to argue for or against the vaccines; however, in light of what Holt had said about SBG—and my own “rough and partial search for answers”—these statements strike me as very true:
First: Over hundreds of years, vaccines have evidently saved lives, but they—much more than horticulture—are beyond the capacity of nearly all of us to produce, study, and evaluate. However, is it so farfetched to wonder if drug makers could at least attempt to bring as much transparency to the production of vaccines as possible? After all, it has been done: Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, created a COVID-19 vaccine, Corbevax, which is free of patents, cheap to produce, and utilizes a well-established technology. Unlike the big three, this vaccine may finally remedy vaccine inequity world-wide. While rich countries have received enough doses to vaccinate their population many times over, poorer countries have been unable to inoculate their citizens even partially. People who are reluctant may have more comfort in an older technology than a newer one, and it really is a bad sign if we are told that salvation comes from the rich alone.
The classic example of transparency is that of Jonas Salk who chose not to patent the polio vaccine so that it became property of the world, instead of his alone.
Second: Why shouldn’t we criticize what SBG science has failed to study, given their Savior-like posture? We have quintessential proof that things aside from vaccines do help us to fight off COVID, vaccinated or not—base-line good physical health is Number 1. Why so little effort to study bee propolis as a vaccine adjuvant? Why so little effort to study herbal remedies, heat therapy, or nasal irrigation as adjuncts? Most heinous of all: the condemnation of those who suggest such things might be beneficial in protecting us from the dangers of viruses, even as a mere helper to the heavy-lifting vaccine.
For SBG to say, “It doesn’t work because we haven’t studied it,” is a blatant non sequitur. They’ve used that tired line on cannabis for going-on a century—for psilocybin, for over fifty-five years—both products of nature by which good scientists and laymen swear by. (See note 1.) Australian researcher Geoffrey Phillip Dobson, writing in the journal Frontiers, states, “Big Science is not the answer, and history has shown that most discoveries are made serendipitously by individual scientists thinking outside-the-box.”
Regarding Dr. Hotez’s Corbevax, Vice.com writes that Tito Vodka has contributed more funding than the US government and the G7 countries have provided. The author writes: “To date, the US and European countries have hoarded vaccines, and pharmaceutical companies and the US government have refused to share the manufacturing know-how and recipes.” This is a disgrace, and even those who thankfully received the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines should criticize this type of self-serving behavior. Such criticism is the moral thing to do. We need more of it, especially from those who embraced the vaccines. (See note 2.)
We unschoolers should first be our own scientists, doctors, and educators; we can wisely consult with those who also seek subtlety and transparency—and although we are not guaranteed anything—we shall more likely than otherwise make the best choices for ourselves and feel well-served.
NOTES
A great example of a non sequitur: The United States government states that cannabis has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” For this, they have incarcerated tens of thousands of people (at the taxpayers’ expense) who merely use it. Yet the FDA itself says, “The study of cannabis and cannabis-derived compounds in clinical trial settings is needed to assess the safety and effectiveness of these substances for the treatment of any disease or condition.” What has the FDA been doing for the last seventy years while these people have been languishing in prison—very specifically, in the years since 1988 when the DEA’s own administrative law judge ruled that cannabis should be rescheduled? This fallacy is outrageous, to put it mildly.
Nearly eight months after the Vice.com article was published, NPR reported on the vaccine’s real-world success. Corbevax is not only in demand in developing nations with large populations (with 70+ million doses in India alone), but it also demonstrably provides long-lasting immunity, maintains an impressive safety record, and is vegan and halal certified. Cultural aptness in a vaccine is obviously one of the key factors of how readily people will use it.